Mindfulness meditation seems to save us all from anxiety and depression. This is also big business. In 2015, this growing industry earned him nearly US$1 billion. Revenue comes from speaking engagements, workshops, books, and an app to guide you through the process. His popular Headspace app he claims has been downloaded 70 million times. Calm, the #1 Meditation App, Over 150 Million! Considering the state of our world, it’s no surprise that the number of people seeking relief from daily stress is unsurprising.
But will it work? Mindfulness meditation has been the subject of scrutiny by scientists. The number of studies published on this is increasing exponentially, with a significant number published in 2023 alone. research research This is an attempt to summarize what we’ve learned so far about mindfulness and how it can help with anxiety, depression, ADHD, pain, sleep, and cognition at all ages.
On the surface, everything looks promising. But it turns out there are so many underlying issues, and my conclusion is that something is better than nothing.
Small blessings that disappear
Mindfulness meditation has its roots in Asian Buddhist traditions. Jon Kabat-Zinn is widely credited with bringing this technology to the West. Kabat-Zinn was introduced to this technique by a Zen missionary who lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while Kabat-Zinn was earning his PhD in molecular biology. He continued to research meditation, founding the Center for Stress Reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979, and developing his now famous eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course. It is important to point out that mindfulness meditation is usually stripped of the spirituality or ethical philosophy under which it was practiced.
The goal of mindfulness meditation is not to empty your mind. Rather, it’s about training yourself to pay attention to the present moment without judgment. Breathing is often used as an anchor. They are taught to choose a place where they can feel their breath, for example their nose or chest. You pay attention to your breath coming in and going out. Worries, thoughts, and regrets inevitably surface and distract you. You simply acknowledge that this is happening and return your attention to your breathing. It all sounds so easy, but it can actually be frustrating, especially considering there are so many distractions around us these days.
The definition of mindfulness is straightforward. But in reality, it’s like trying to catch a wet fish, and the practice is difficult to study. Among his best-selling books on a broader range of topics: how to meditate, psychotherapist Lawrence Leshan pointed out that meditation can be practiced in a variety of ways, including arranging flowers, practicing martial arts, and singing religious songs. With such a comprehensive toolkit, it’s hard to know exactly where mindfulness begins and ends. As Brian Resnick reported, vox, one scientific study had children color for 15 minutes, which researchers said was a “mindfulness-based” activity. Mindfulness can also be part of a larger therapy, such as acceptance and commitment therapy. Whatever benefits are measured there, are they really brought about by the mindfulness component or by other factors? Many scientists question this inaccuracy between studies. I am concerned that it will be very difficult to compare.
However, this did not stop the explosion of systematic reviews and meta-analyses on the subject. Many of them report benefits from treatment, but the devil is in the details. When testing mindfulness in a randomized controlled trial, each participant is placed into one of two groups: the mindfulness group or the control group.In some cases, the control group active controlThat is, participants are given some kind of intervention. It might be psycho-educational, or you might be listening to a guided meditation, but instead of participating in the meditation, you’re told to count the verbs.However, the control group is often Passive control. Participants may be placed on a waiting list to receive mindfulness training much later. So while people in the mindfulness group do something to deal with anxiety, depression, or insomnia, people in the passive group do nothing. Is it any wonder then that mindfulness is almost always better than passive control?
The problem is that mindfulness has rarely been shown to be better than active control. Many of the authors of systematic reviews of the evidence excitedly reported that mindfulness showed a small but significant effect on people in a control group, and then rigorously compared mindfulness with an active control group. I quietly add that there was no difference in that case. The bottom line here is that doing something is better than doing nothing. I have often seen this when so-called complementary or alternative medical interventions are touted as scientifically proven. Often they were compared to people who received nothing. If you’re in pain or have mild anxiety, you’ll feel better seeing someone, even someone intervening based on magical beliefs, than being ignored.
Even when researchers try their best at mindfulness, the effects seem to be small. Despite the accumulation of lackluster results, I have read many discussion sections of the paper and quite a few editorials linking essentially negative results to enthusiasm for future research. This is a great example of white hat bias, where information is distorted to make the goal seem righteous. It would be great if mindfulness meditation could reliably treat anxiety, insomnia, and pain perception. Therefore, many scientists in this field prove That mindfulness is a good thing. This attitude is not limited to this practice. Rather, the image we have of scientists is disprove In my experience, their assumptions are rarely seen in practice. Scientists want to prove that something cool and interesting exists, even when the evidence in front of them isn’t convincing.
Some may claim that mindfulness meditation has helped them. Maybe it’s because they’ve been practicing it for years. Studies tend to be conducted over a very short period of time, so if benefits take time to actually appear, they are unlikely to be found in current research.It may also be due to mindfulness. can However, there doesn’t seem to be anything magical or concrete about it. You may find a similar sense of relief by practicing other relaxing activities. They may also report deeper changes in themselves, perhaps a kind of mystical experience or spiritual awakening. These kinds of results are very difficult to measure in a research context and are unlikely to surface when the study ends after just two months.
And there are so many problems with these studies that show how difficult it is to investigate the human mind. Sometimes, researchers report that mindfulness improved participants’ composite scores, the sum of various measures of anxiety, depression, stress, etc. For example, a meta-analysis showed that mindfulness does indeed work for high school-age youth when looking at composite scores…but that effect disappeared when looking at anxiety and depression alone. And even something as simple as anxiety can be measured using a variety of questionnaires, but are they all really measuring the same thing?The second question is who to test. Can we compare children and teenagers? Can we combine teenagers and young adults? What if age makes a difference in response to mindfulness interventions?
Beyond these issues, there is a crucial difference between efficacy and efficacy, two words that are not synonymous in science. Mindfulness is effective when the intervention is performed under ideal conditions. Its effectiveness depends on how it performs in the real world. Are there any world-famous apps that can help you meditate? Maybe they’ll help you a little, but if you don’t use them, they won’t help you.When introduced in a research context, a quarter of participants abandon the experiment during the research itself. (This number is similar to what we see for mental health apps in general.) Dropouts can be partially avoided by paying participants, but Headspace does not allow them to continue using the app. It is unlikely that they will start paying customers for it. Outside of research projects encouraging people to use meditation apps, the numbers are even worse. Thousands of people who chose to get his one-year membership of the Calm app were tracked in time, and more than half of them abandoned the app within his one year. For those who continued to meditate, the average duration of meditation was less than 4 minutes per day. This harkens back to the days before the Apple Watch, when dedicated fitness trackers often ended up in a drawer. The tracker may have been effective in testing, but if you don’t wear it, it’s ineffective.
If you still want to try mindfulness meditation to see if it can make a difference in your life, you should also be aware of its dark side. The harm may be slight, but we need to be mindful of them.
Happiness is a work of the mind
Although meditation is completely harmless for most people, scholars have expressed concern that its side effects are often not systematically reported in the literature. There are also examples of people experiencing panic attacks, trauma flashbacks, depersonalization, disorientation, and even psychosis after mindfulness. These undesirable consequences appear to be rare and may affect very specific types of people who should be told to avoid them, but given that these effects are poorly documented and it is impossible to estimate precisely how common those effects are.
Despite the lukewarm literature on the benefits of mindfulness, there is something unsettling about how quickly it has been adopted by employers and schools. Part of the reason is that it pushes social problems onto individuals. A common message is that people feel stressed, depressed, and anxious about the world around them because they don’t meditate enough. We’re already seeing this with pollution and climate change, and how easily companies can impose obligations on consumers to stop littering and recycle. Professor Ronald Purser writes in his poignant essay: [mindfulness meditation] Help them adapt to the very situation that caused the problem. ” Why should those in power improve the system we live in when they can just tell us to meditate and get used to it?
But the bottom line is, I’m not against mindfulness meditation. I object to organizations that resist change touting it as a coping tool and proselytizing it as an ongoing revolution when mountains of scientific evidence have shown that: I’m against letting it happen. at least in the short term, its benefits are no different from those of similar stress-relieving activities, but its potential harms are poorly understood. To better understand what mindfulness is capable of, we need longer-term studies with active control groups, and whether and how people continue to meditate after the study ends. Multi-year follow-up studies will be required to confirm whether this is the case.
If you want to try mindfulness, just focus on your breathing and keep your expectations low.
Take-home message:
– Mindfulness meditation is a practice that teaches you to focus on the present moment and redirect your attention to it non-judgmentally when you become distracted.
– When studied in randomized clinical trials on a variety of issues such as anxiety, depression, and stress, mindfulness meditation often provides a small benefit over doing nothing, but nothing other than meditation The advantage generally disappears when compared to
– Mindfulness meditation appears to be safe for most people, but reports of complications such as traumatic flashbacks and psychosis have prompted scientists to better report side effects in studies of this form of meditation. It is being
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